Children's hours

A remarkable series examines the emotions and harsh realities of an 'uplifting' Chicago hospital.

July 02, 2002|By Bob Condor, Tribune staff reporter.

The Pony League baseball game was just one of hundreds played in the Chicago area on a recent summer day. That was just the point for 13-year-old Tom Ford and his physician, Stewart Goldman.

"The game was a true highlight for me," said Goldman, director of the Falk Brain Tumor Center at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Ford is a patient who through chemotherapy has significantly reduced a large tumor in his head. The tumor is benign but its size was putting pressure on the teen's skull and threatening his life. He has been in and out of the hospital since he was 6 years old.

Ford, Goldman and many other patients, parents, doctors and nurses will be featured for the next six Tuesday nights in "Children's Hospital," a new PBS reality series (9 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11) co-produced by the British firm Lion Television and Oregon Public Broadcasting. It is an intense six hours of television with equal doses of purpose and story lines.

The weekly hour inside the worlds of people like Ford and Gail Brodkey, an emergency room social worker who separates fact and sometimes parental fiction about how a child was injured, is plenty enough to process. You will find yourself thinking about these kids and their parents for days.

It might be a 10-month-old baby who needs a new liver (like his toddler brother, who needed a similar transplant just months earlier). Or maybe a 10-year-old boy whose mother accidentally ran over his leg with a riding mower, then, in horror, of course, heard her son ask, "What are we going to do?"

The folks at Lion wrapped up filming in April, but clearly would have attended Ford's baseball game and likely filmed it on a Sony DSR-500 CK camera, which is small enough to allow the show's producers to shoot their own film while another production person records sound. A crew of seven people shot hundreds of hours of film.

"The new cameras do two things," said Nick Catliff, executive producer of the series and company director of a firm that has produced many programs for PBS, BBC, Discovery and many other networks. "We can be at the hospital longer because it costs less to keep the crew there. And our filming can be more intimate."

Hospital search

Lion Television developed a short list of prospective children's hospitals for the series. A pre-production visit to Children's Memorial, in which a producer spent about three days accompanying doctors during their workdays, won over Catliff and company.

"It is a self-confident institution," he explained. "We wanted to cover issues but not in an environment where doctors and nurses are defensive. Plus, we realized there were some fantastic characters among the doctors."

Another fact that didn't hurt was Children's Memorial's status as one of only five free-standing pediatric research centers in the country and numerous designations on top 10 lists of specialties. Chicago was another attraction, Catliff said, calling it a "great American city." Scenes of the skyline and elevated trains are used as a way to indicate day, night or next day. Lion producers arrived in mid-2001, but didn't start filming for nearly two months, using the early weeks to gain the trust of doctors, nurses, parents and kids alike.

A question begs: Why would parents allow their kids to be documented with Sony cameras during such vulnerable and tumultuous times? Some families did decline participation, Goldman said, but many others were willing to become the stars of this series.

"I was actually surprised at how open the kids and parents were," Goldman said. "Some kids simply appreciated the chance to tell their story. In a way, it makes them feel special.

"For parents, one motivator was raising awareness about children's illness. They wanted to help other families get through it a little bit easier."

Private moments

The access to private moments will stagger viewers at times. One scene lasting a couple of minutes shows the reaction of a mother and grandfather absorbing the fact they just took an infant son off life support.

"We have a long track record of doing documentaries about children's hospitals here in the U.K.," Catliff said. "In fact, during one production, one of my business partners had his own daughter fall ill and stay in a hospital for a long time. It made him and all of us think about what we are doing."

Catliff said cameras in a hospital are undoubtedly invasive. He said it was incumbent to put the emotional access to highest use.

"We wanted to examine and discuss major issues facing children's hospitals," he said. "On another less overt level, we are hoping people think about themselves in the process. What makes it all work is good storytelling."